john hughes is my god

I was just about to sit down and watch a vhs (yeah, a vhs) I recently purchased entitled bad medicine, starring the illustrious steve guttenberg, and thought it worthwhile to explain my love of 80s movies.

While I can’t vouch for the film in question, concerning as it does, according to wikipedia, “ethnic stereotypes”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Medicine_(film)

i certainly can vouch for 80s movies generally with exactly that carpet statement. The eighties come in for a lot of flack, as do its movies, and indeed my movies, the ones I love, the ones I own on vhs proudly. and continue to buy on VHS. The eighties are oftentimes considered worthwhile only in ironic terms, or especially in ironic terms.

The thing for me is that 80s movies represent the era I was born into. I grew up with my parent’s telling me the reader’s digest version of thatcher, of conservatism, of economics, of war with the first gulf, and I remember the early films I watched and my first visits to the cinema being filled with joy and excitement and removal from reality. I remember seeing back to the future III at the old theatre one in Coventry, now gone, where popcorn piled high on the floor, tickets were cheap, and so were the customers. It sits in a still inhospitable corner of the city centre, and has held various short lived estalishments since theatre one closed.

I remember going to the movies and having to complain that the picture/sound quality was awful. Even more so, I remember this with videos. The video shop, only open on rainy days or so my brother one thought, represented a world of options, some for older people, some just for you. All of them contained an hour and a half’s escapism in grainy and imperfect form.

The problem with films today, for me, isn’t the film itself, but the perfection of its delivery. Digitisation had made all of our expectations too high. Perfection is the least of our expectations. Faultless delivery, on time, still hot etc.

Videos represent the chance that things might not work out okay, either for yourself or the protaganist. Okay, the geeky girl will always get the cool guy, but hey, that’s what escapism is for. and that’s just it, the loser wins. Time and again, the films I watched when I was younger helped me believe in myself. Teen Wolf represented to a gangly boy who wished he was better at basketball the chance that it might just happen, one full moon, with a killer soundtrack.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30sYk9B4OqU

and John Hughes: the ultimate movie maker for Generation X. In Hughes’ world, anything was possible, it was okay to be below average, and you weren’t stuck in what you were born with.

As another recession kicks in, I can only hope a return to hopefulness and imperfection enters the world of movies, and by extension, our understanding of ourselves.